The dizi industry's geographic imaginaries and narratives of global success

Abstract

Based on 21 months of ethnographic research in the dizi industry, Turkey's internationally popular serialized TV melodramas, this article explores how dizi makers explain their productions’ global popularity and how they imagine, classify, and discuss foreign markets. It describes dizi makers’ competing ideas of the “global” and different regimes of value when evaluating the popularity of their products in the world. It illustrates how Turkish dizi creatives, seeking prestige, regard the wide-spread circulation of their productions in Non-Western contexts not as an asset but as an impediment to achieving symbolic capital and recognition. The article also demonstrates that at a time when a significant portion of the dizi industry's profits come from foreign sales in Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East, producers and distributors find themselves in a position where a notion of the “global” that is inclusive of non-Western regions is strategically and economically necessary to them. It makes the case that despite these differences in what it means to be global—for dizi creators who seek prestige and for the distributors and producers that focus on profitability—both construct the global using developmentalist logics.